Her name was Ollie Singleton.  She ran off and married Fred when she was sixteen, I think.  They were farmers and he worked for Ford.  Simple, salt of the earth kind of people.  She raised seven kids.  During the Depression he sold coal off a donkey cart on Peachtree Street when it was still a dirt road.  Their kids didn’t always have shoes.  Ollie was always pretty thin and barely five feet tall on a good day but she was a force to be reckoned with.  Just to have survived the life she lived proves a strength and grit far exceeding her petite frame.  But the fact that she lived her later years, the years I knew her, as a happy woman speaks more to me now than I realized as a child.  I never saw a trace of bitterness in her.  She was kind and caring, loving, affectionate, and fiery.  She wasn’t afraid to scold us, or Fred for that matter, but she never held on to it.  And that’s a big deal, I’m learning.  She chewed tobacco with Fred but if anyone came up he’d claim it was his. Sometimes, when it was just me and her on her front porch swing, she would tell me, as if it were a secret, that I reminded her of her of her grandmother who was a full blooded Cherokee…it always made me feel special.  She always gave us extra peppermint sticks when our parents weren’t looking and she made the best fig preserves I’ve ever had.

    

My grandmother, Francis, was her first child and her only daughter.  Francis was 4’11” and perhaps more petite than Ollie, although she somehow managed to be the captain of her high school basketball team.  Also while in high school, Francis had dinner with Babe Ruth before a game in the Big Apple when her Chemistry teacher (from Manhattan), who had recently been relocated to their country school, took a few students on a field trip to see New York City, where she had been working on a “Big Project”…you put the pieces together.  After high school, Francis was offered a full ride to Berry College but Fred wouldn’t let her go because no one in their family had gone to college and he couldn’t see why a girl should go.  For that reason alone I am proud to call Berry my alma matter.  Francis lived to see many accomplishments, both professionally and personally.  But the thing that strikes me most today is that I knew both women to be, at the end of their lives, loving and happy.  

 

Francis died of Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago, Ollie last night.  I wish I had a picture to post of them but never took a picture of either woman.

 

The picture above is one I took of myself while I was pregnant with River...I still had a month to go.  Ollie thought River was precious.